Hitler's Heroine: Hanna Reitsch by Sophie Jackson Read Free Book Online Page A

completely unaware she was performing a series of involuntary loops. Still the glider shot downwards, Hanna hanging from her harness while the world shrieked by.
    The mica windows had frosted over. A sudden claustrophobia enveloped Hanna and she smashed her fist into the plastic, forcing open a hole, so at least she could get one last look at the world. Her head spun, her brain in agony as the g-forces of the dive pummelled her. She was frozen, the rain pouring through the hole in the mica drenching her light summer dress. Her hands had turned blue. Hanna had failed the Baby and all she could do now was let go of the controls and hold a vain hope the natural stability of the plane would counter the dive. Fear had turned into panic, an overwhelming sense of terror engulfing Hanna Reitsch. She could not move a muscle. The fierce gale of air caused by the plummeting glider had forced her mouth open as she tried to clench her teeth.
    Then, remarkably, the Baby started to climb again. The violent thrust from one position to another was even worse for Hanna. Her eyes felt as though they were bulging from their sockets and Hanna expected blood to spurt from her temples any moment. ‘HANNA-A-’ she screamed to herself, trying to get her mind out if its loop of terror. ‘Ya! Ya-a! Coward! Hang on, can’t you, cowa-ar-!’ The Baby flipped again, and now when Hanna dared to look up it was not sky she saw but dark brown earth. Something awoke inside her; she reached automatically for the controls and turned the glider right-side up. She was still very high in the air, ahead were the snow-covered peaks of Riesengebirge and even further away the rapidly moving storm clouds. She had been spat out by the clouds and by some chance of fate had survived her deadly plunge. The terror receded as fast as it had come. The slopes of Riesengebirge coasted by beneath her. Despite the ear-splitting dive, Hanna was still over 5,000ft up.
    Picking a clear spot for a landing, Hanna came down beside a hotel-restaurant serving a ski resort on the Schneekoppe. It was evening and no one appeared to notice her land. Hanna walked into the hotel and presented a strange sight to the skiers; not only was she completely inappropriately dressed for such altitudes, but Hanna was soaked from head to foot, her hair clinging to her head and face in bedraggled dreadlocks. She placed a call to Wolf Hirth from the hotel reception. The Baby would need a tow to get her airborne again and there was a lot of explaining to do, not least because Hanna had crash-landed across the Czechoslovak border and come down in a neutral zone without permission. Germany, or rather Hitler, had been nagging at Czechoslovakian anxieties for a while (they were soon to discover with good reason). A German glider in the middle of the neutral zone was going to ring alarm bells.
    Hirth could not risk landing his own powered plane on foreign soil to rescue Hanna. The best he could do was to drop a towrope and leave his student the task of recruiting skiers from the hotel to haul her up into the air. Fortunately, the hotel residents were enjoying the novelty of the unexpected plane and a number of them volunteered to pull on the Baby’s starting rope. Hanna took to the air once more. Darkness was descending as Hanna traced her path back to Hirschberg. She lost sight of Hirth before long and visual landmarks vanished into the gathering night. She landed in a likely looking field. The glider had lost too much height for anything else, and she resigned herself to wait for Hirth to find her once more. This was to be just the first of many Hanna-esque adventures.
    Hanna came close to losing her wings again that day in 1933, both literally (for she had come close to crashing) and metaphorically. What would the new German regime make of the daring girl who had broken frontier regulations and crash-landed in Czechoslovakia? In fact, the authorities were ecstatic – Hanna had broken a new altitude